Field
The present disclosure relates to telecommunications apparatus and methods.
Description of Related Art
The “background” description provided herein is for the purpose of generally presenting the context of the disclosure. Work of the presently named inventors, to the extent it is described in this background section, as well as aspects of the description which may not otherwise qualify as prior art at the time of filing, are neither expressly or impliedly admitted as prior art against the present invention.
The present invention relates to wireless telecommunications systems and methods, and in particular to systems and methods for restricted bandwidth/virtual carrier operation in wireless telecommunication systems.
Mobile communication systems have evolved over the past ten years or so from the GSM System (Global System for Mobile communications) to the 3G system and now include packet data communications as well as circuit switched communications. The third generation partnership project (3GPP) is developing a fourth generation mobile communication system referred to as Long Term Evolution (LTE) in which a core network part has been evolved to form a more simplified architecture based on a merging of components of earlier mobile radio network architectures and a radio access interface which is based on Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) on the downlink and Single Carrier Frequency Division Multiple Access (SC-FDMA) on the uplink.
Third and fourth generation mobile telecommunication systems, such as those based on the 3GPP defined UMTS and Long Term Evolution (LTE) architectures, are able to support a more sophisticated range of services than simple voice and messaging services offered by previous generations of mobile telecommunication systems.
For example, with the improved radio interface and enhanced data rates provided by LTE systems, a user is able to enjoy high data rate applications such as mobile video streaming and mobile video conferencing that would previously only have been available via a fixed line data connection. The demand to deploy third and fourth generation networks is therefore strong and the coverage area of these networks, i.e. geographic locations where access to the networks is possible, is expected to increase rapidly.
The anticipated widespread deployment of third and fourth generation networks has led to the parallel development of a class of devices and applications which, rather than taking advantage of the high data rates available, instead take advantage of the robust radio interface and increasing ubiquity of the coverage area. Examples include so-called machine type communication (MTC) applications, some of which are in some respects typified by semi-autonomous or autonomous wireless communication devices (MTC devices) communicating small amounts of data on a relatively infrequent basis. Examples include so-called smart meters which, for example, are located in a customer's home and periodically transmit data back to a central MTC server relating to the customer's consumption of a utility such as gas, water, electricity and so on. Smart metering is merely one example of potential MTC device applications. Further information on characteristics of MTC-type devices can be found, for example, in the corresponding standards, such as ETSI TS 122 368 V10.530 (2011 July)/3GPP TS 22.368 version 10.5.0 Release 10) [1].
Whilst it can be convenient for a terminal such as an MTC-type terminal to take advantage of the wide coverage area provided by a third or fourth generation mobile telecommunication network there are at present disadvantages. Unlike a conventional third or fourth generation mobile terminal such as a smartphone, a primary driver for MTC-type terminals will be a desire for such terminals to be relatively simple and inexpensive. The type of functions typically performed by an MTC-type terminal (e.g. simple collection and reporting/reception of relatively small amounts of data) do not require particularly complex processing to perform, for example, compared to a smartphone supporting video streaming. However, third and fourth generation mobile telecommunication networks typically employ advanced data modulation techniques and support wide bandwidth usage on the radio interface which can require more complex and expensive radio transceivers and decoders to implement. It is usually justified to include such complex elements in a smartphone as a smartphone will typically require a powerful processor to perform typical smartphone type functions. However, as indicated above, there is now a desire to use relatively inexpensive and less complex devices which are nonetheless able to communicate using LTE-type networks.
With this in mind there has been proposed a concept of so-called “virtual carriers” operating within the bandwidth of a “host carrier”, for example, as described in GB 2 487 906 [2], GB 2 487 908 [3], GB 2 487 780 [4], GB 2 488 513 [5], GB 2 487 757 [6], GB 2 487 909 [7], GB 2 487 907 [8] and GB 2 487 782 [9]. One principle underlying the concept of a virtual carrier is that a frequency subregion within a wider bandwidth host carrier is configured for use as a self-contained carrier for at least some types of communications with certain types of terminal device.
In some implementations, such as described in references [2] to [9], all downlink control signalling and user-plane data for terminal devices using the virtual carrier are conveyed within the frequency subregion. A terminal device operating on the virtual carrier is made aware of the restricted frequency band and need only receive and decode a corresponding subset of transmission resources to receive data from the base station. An advantage of this approach is to provide a carrier for use by low-capability terminal devices capable of operating over only relatively narrow bandwidths. This allows devices to communicate on LTE-type networks, without requiring the devices to support full bandwidth operation. By reducing the bandwidth of the signal that needs to be decoded, the front end processing requirements (e.g., FFT, channel estimation, subframe buffering etc.) of a device configured to operate on a virtual carrier are reduced since the complexity of these functions is generally related to the bandwidth of the signal received.
Other virtual carrier approaches for reducing the required complexity of devices configured to communicate over LTE-type networks are proposed in GB 2 497 743 [10] and GB 2 497 742 [11]. These documents propose schemes for communicating data between a base station and a reduced-capability terminal device whereby physical-layer control information for the reduced-capability terminal device is transmitted from the base station using subcarriers selected from across a full host carrier frequency band (as for conventional LTE terminal devices). However, higher-layer data for reduced-capability terminal devices (e.g. user-plane data) is transmitted using only subcarriers selected from within a restricted frequency band which is smaller than and within the system frequency band. Thus, this is an approach in which user-plane data for a particular terminal device may be restricted to a subset of frequency resources (i.e. a virtual carrier supported within the transmission resources of a host carrier), whereas control signalling is communicated using the full bandwidth of the host carrier. The terminal device is made aware of the restricted frequency band, and as such need only buffer and process data within this restricted frequency band during periods when higher-layer data is being transmitted. The terminal device buffers and processes the full system frequency band during periods when physical-layer control information is being transmitted. Thus, the reduced-capability terminal device may be incorporated in a network in which physical-layer control information is transmitted over a wide frequency range, but only needs to have sufficient memory and processing capacity to process a smaller range of frequencies for the higher-layer data. This approach may sometimes be referred to as a “T-shaped” allocation because area of the downlink time-frequency resource grid to be used by the reduced-capability terminal device typically comprises a generally T-shape.
Virtual carrier concepts thus allow terminal devices having reduced capabilities, for example in terms of their transceiver bandwidth and/or processing power, to be supported within LTE-type networks. As noted above, this can be useful for to allow relatively inexpensive and low complexity devices to communicate using LTE-type networks.
In some situations more than one virtual carrier may be supported in a host carrier. In this case the different virtual carriers are located at different frequencies within the host carrier bandwidth and individual terminal devices are allocated to one of the virtual carriers. This approach can be used to increase the number of terminal devices that can be supported using virtual carrier communications. However, in order to do this, it is necessary for individual terminal devices and the base station establish which frequency particular resources (i.e. which of the plurality of virtual carriers) is to be used by a given terminal device. Typically this requires some level of control signalling to be exchanged between the base station and the respective terminal devices, for example for the base station to inform the terminal device of which virtual carrier it is to be allocated to. This need for terminal device specific control signalling to be exchanged between the base station and the terminal devices gives rise to some drawbacks. For example, there can be an increase in signalling complexity with information being exchanged in dedicated signalling during connection establishment, and more generally, it gives rise to an increase in control signalling overhead in the telecommunications system, particularly in the case where there are a high number of devices in a cell.
Accordingly, there is a desire for approaches for allocating specific terminal devices to specific virtual carriers in wireless telecommunications systems.